I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised over the last few months by some really positive service experiences in places I never would have expected – “Big Whale” organizations.

I think if you ask most folks they’d tell you that larger, older businesses or government agencies increase the chances you’ll have an underwhelming service experience, while smaller business have a “personal touch”. But experiences I’ve had within the last six months have reversed my thinking.

“I find for the defendant!”

Let’s start with the least likely of places – Austin’s Municipal Court. “Excuse me, I’m sorry; did you say the Austin Municipal Court?” Yep, I did.

I took an online defensive driving course for a speeding ticket (45 in a 35, grrr…) and, scouts honor, arrived on my court date only to discover my course completion document wasn’t in the envelope when I arrived! Frustrating? Yoouuuu betcha!!

Addressing my plight meant speaking with three folks behind counters in the building, and to a person they were unbelievably patient, informative, and courteous. I was offered a customer satisfaction survey card and gave them rave reviews. Um, the extension they gave me on the certification document helped.

“Wow. That was easier than I thought”

My wife and I were married in early October and we’re in the process of merging two homes full of stuff. It’s one thing to move from one full house to one empty house. Try moving two fully furnished homes in to one! “Uh, honey, near as I can tell we now have 14 salt & pepper shakers, three corkscrews, and four bottles of ground cinnamon. What say you?”. But I digress. One such area was the cable/phone/internet solutions. We weren’t looking forward to the daunting task of comparing our packages and switching.

• Expecting mediocre to “ok” from Time-Warner we got intelligent, informative answers, our expectations set correctly, and relief when we expressed our displeasure with a cancellation fee we didn’t like. The “retention department” was great, all but eliminating the fee. Even the guy who came out to the house for the box swap was great. Hence, we’re still Time-Warner customers.
• AT&T was also good. Not quite as good as Time-Warner, but still good. No hold time, no hassle, and they made sure we had what we needed.
• Lastly, I had a home owner’s insurance claim for hail damage that could not have been smoother from the first call to the last.

So what gives?

Consumer switching costs are relatively low. Anyone can change service providers easily and with little or no interruptions. Granted, I can’t switch courts if I don’t like the service. But I *can* vote. Even the electric/utilities in our city can be swapped with a phone call. In order to save these customers companies figured out they needed to make service a competitive advantage as well as a marketable asset. Certainly the companies mentioned above serve up horror stories to customers now and then, but they know it’s the exception, not the rule, and they tend to work in the background to address those challenges.

Now that the bar is raised I hope they continue on this path and that other big whales follow suit.

I submit this as an entirely unscientific, poorly researched, and potentially misleading set of information. But here it is nonetheless. The Indeed.com web site offers a dynamic job growth trend chart based on search terms you enter.

I searched for job postings with “tech support” OR “technical support”. Note the absolute nosedive since January of 2009 through today, or at least as recently as July as the chart indicates. In and of itself it’s not surprising given the economic climate, however when compared to “customer service” search results beneath it stands in stark contrast.

Why would one set crater while the other soars? I’m not sure. Potentially the experience and/or knowledge of tech support staff demand higher salaries than those of more vanilla customer service employees and the result is a freeze on new/open job requisitions for that role. Another possibility is the emerging & growing trend of community forums to drive support organizations. Lastly, the healthcare debate has been rampant, reminding everyone that Pop Tarts, Twinkies, and Cheetos are rife with peril and drive insurance costs up. Given the copious amounts of junk food tech support folks eat, it comes as no surprise they are feeling the pinch in the job market AND their waste lines. Will be interesting to see how these trends change over the coming months.

(ahem, no, I’m not serious about the Twinkies part)

Bootstrap Service Blog

When I started Bootstrap Service I did so with the idea that many younger or emerging companies were doing themselves a disservice by not making the right choices and investments in their customer service or support efforts early enough in their evolution. It’s my belief that this approach forces companies to react to customer service activity rather than being proactive and getting prepared, resulting in far less agility and much higher costs in hard dollars, poor service delivery, lower customer satisfaction, and diluted brand value.

Wanting some empirical evidence I visited the “Austin Emerging 100” site, opened up Excel, and browsed the “About Us” pages on every one of the companies listed looking for the executive staff titles. My approach was simple. Browse the “Management Team” page for each company and enter in Excel each executive title listed with a company name. I then tagged each listing with a business function (e.g. “Sales”, “Engineering”, “Service”, etc.)

The results were startling. I captured 458 executive titles out of 95 companies that were still in business from the list. Of the 458 titles, only 3 contained the word “Customer”, and only six had anything to do with service or support if I included the very few Directors and Managers listed. In fact, if I included ALL of the titles that involved professional services, field service, client implementation, etc., it was still only 5% of the total.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Smaller companies simply cannot afford to spend precious capital on service needs when there are few, if any, customers early in their life cycle. Yet most of them know it’s an important component of success. But it begged the question:

“If every company has a customer service or support function and only six are dedicated to customer service, who in the list of458 titles owns the rest?”

Between polls, asking those I know, calling a handful of businesses, etc., I was able to come up with the answer. They report to the “VP of Underscore”. It’s all over the map. Some report to VP of Operations, others report to the VP of Sales, the VP of Engineering, the COO, etc. Few of these folks have customer service as their core competency or discipline and they’ll continue to run things until the activity level gets above the knee caps as their customer install base grows. That’s when they and their company begin to “react” and are often at a loss as to how to put together a service strategy and implementation plan that aligns with their product success strategy. It proved my theory and Bootstrap Service continues to grow as we target businesses in need of specific service expertise without having to hire someone full time. Ask me who the ideal executive is for my sales efforts and I’ll respond with “the VP of Underscore.”

p.s. The irony is that the “About Us” and “Management Team” links are next to the “Support” links on 90% of the web sites. Go figure.

It must be me having a bad month. Here’s a small collection of some very recent real-life experiences I’ve had that shine a light on how simple it is to screw up a great first impression with poor execution…

Zoho CRM is “at your Help”

A compatriot of mine mentioned Zoho CRM as a viable CRM option for our customers so I checked out the product. I was very impressed with their offering and thought I’d use it as my own production CRM for a while to compare against pricier solutions. A few days later I received what I’m 100% positive was a well intentioned email with the subject line “Zoho CRM – I am at your Help”. The message itself started out alright and then came “… I’m responsible to assist you”. Yuk. Great first impression followed up by a poor second one.

Lesson Learned

The first interactions from your business to a new/potential customer are absolutely critical. Have marketing or a PR person review them and use system email templates to ensure consistency. Heck, have your Mom proof read it if you have to!  Else, “risk not at helping company reputation!”

—

RightNow CRM – “Ask for a Live Demo … later sometime. Maybe next week? We’re not sure.”

Right-Now CRM looked like a good fit for one of my customer’s needs. Great looking product that competes on price with other CRM vendors. Visited the site, clicked the big blue button that said “Ask for a Live Demo”, then … crickets. Nothing happened. The day went by and not so much as an email (“Uh, this IS a CRM solution, right?”). Later the next day I got a call from a super nice inside sales rep. After some understandable Q&A I was ready to schedule my “Live Demo”. Unfortunately all I got scheduled was ANOTHER discovery call with a regional sales rep and his SC so they could prepare and schedule the “Live Demo”. I’m ok with this though. I’d rather have a sales rep armed with more knowledge than less so the demo targets my needs. But lost in this shuffle is the big blue button “Schedule a Live Demo”. It’s been five days since I filled out the form plus a 20 minute prep call and I still have not scheduled the “Live Demo”. Seems like the immediacy of the button text doesn’t jive with reality.

Lesson Learned

Make sure you aren’t using verbiage that incorrectly sets expectations and risks disappointing your customers. In this case a simple “Schedule a Demo” would have been better than “Schedule a LIVE Demo”. It felt more urgent and immediate than it actually is and the result is me being underwhelmed out of the shoot. Also have a clock ticking that ensures a customer gets a response within a tight time-frame. If you can’t deliver it, fine. Soften the expectation a bit.

—

Otherinbox.com – “We put your feedback in the other inbox.”

Ok this is a coupla months older but I just remembered it. I signed up for otherinbox.com in late March then cancelled it because it wasn’t a fit for me. I think it likely helps a lot of folks manage email better. What irked me was that as part of the cancellation process they provided one of those “we’re sorry to see you go” pages with a comments section. I took the time to enter my comments in the page so they’d have some feedback. Result? Crickets. I never heard from them again.

Lesson Learned

Don’t ask for a customer’s feedback if you aren’t prepared to respond to it or set the expectation up front that you won’t. Leaving no impression lets the customer/prospect assume you will. If Otherinbox.com had no intention of responding that’s perfectly acceptable as long as they say so. Then if they DID follow up with a personal note or a phone call I’d be impressed. I just searched my Gmail account and there’s nothing from them after the “Welcome to Otherinbox!” and the subsequent analysis alert. Not so much as confirmation that my feedback was heard, nor did my cancellation prompt a canned farewell message.

The bottom line is that out on the edges of any company and their products are oodles of customer touch-points that need to be carefully planned out. It’s important to reconcile messaging with an honest look at what you can actually deliver vs. what you would LIKE to deliver, or worse, BELIEVE you deliver but don’t. Start with the OUTSIDE and walk backwards toward your center rather than the other way around.

I can’t recall a single time where telling the customer the likelihood of a successful outcome was just not in the cards. “Sorry but this is just an absolute train wreck and I can’t envision any scenario where you’ll be successful with our product. I say shut her down, wrap it up, pull the plug, lights out, and I’ll have Finance cut you a check”. It just doesn’t work that way. Wondering what’s possible and applying that energy to an action plan for customer success is far more powerful than pondering what cannot be done, what barriers stand in the way, or how much better things would be if only someone ELSE would change how they think or what they do.

This was a standard week for me in many ways. It was spent meeting new people and learning from them. It’s not hard to find people with interesting insights, knowledge, and know-how. With just a little bit of effort and an open mind a variety of people offer genuinely enlightening discussions. And to a person they are all pleasant and full of smiles and a willingness to help. We all have far more in common in this human experience we call life than we have differences. When I consider what threads were common through all of my introductions and discussions this week it was optimism and an eagerness to tackle the future.

I started Monday with a thank you note for an approval to move forward on building the first set of Support capabilities for a new software company in Austin that booked their first customer and is anxiously anticipating approvals on their 2^nd an 3^rd –future- customers. Wednesday I had a nice frosty beverage after work with a former colleague that was about to accept a Sales position to open some new markets in Texas. Thursday was spent in Dallas speaking with the leadership team of an absolutely terrific company that is profitable, happy, love what they do, and want the Service team to be better than they already are.

Friday afternoon was spent down at the UT campus with the chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering talking about careers for students in Service. I was met with warmth, smiles, energy, and optimism. Oh, and Dr. Amblers distaste for Volvo service capabilities. ;-P I’ll likely end up giving a talk with some of them in the fall semester regarding the importance of the customer experience after the sale of a product, or how and why serviceability matters when you’re a design engineer.

I could focus on my check engine light unexpectedly coming on in the car this week. I could focus on the two prospects that decided to hold off on the RFP I sent. I could focus on any number of seemingly negative developments in my life or the life of others this week. But that mindset won’t get me or anyone else anywhere. And as I consider what has been common throughout my career that brought positive results vs. unwanted outcomes, it’s my frame of mind with family, friends, coworkers, and of course customers.

In the world of Service your mind matters. Focus on positive customer outcomes that are entirely attainable, build a plan, work the plan, refine the plan, and get cranking. Focus on the frame of mind and the metrics will follow.

My article contribution to Customer Management IQ is being featured on the site’s home page today – “Key Considerations for Implementing an Online Knowledge Base”

You can view the home page at this URL:

www.customermanagementiq.com

You can view the article directly here:

http://www.customermanagementiq.com/article.cfm?externalID=767

Are you taking your customers for granted? Here’s some trivia. What wildly successful businessman said this?

“These people are supporting us! …everything that has to do with the experience when they come in should be at the highest level that we can put it at. That’s been our approach traditionally and it hasn’t failed”

CEO of Southwest Airlines? Apple? Nordstrom’s? Nope. If you don’t know I’d understand. It’s Jerry Garcia, the late guitarist for the Grateful Dead during a 1993 pre-show interview in Las Vegas. Sting opened for them. But even if you don’t give two hoots about the Dead or their music, there’s a lesson in their approach that many businesses can learn from.

This past weekend the surviving members of The Grateful Dead returned to the stage in what’s generally viewed as a very successful first show. It’s interesting that a 40+ year old band can still garner an audience of devoted fans and sell out 20 shows in short order.

What’s their secret? Music, of course. But there’s more to it than that.

Watch this fun, chatty, ten minute interview with an articulate Jerry Garcia and you’ll understand some of the reasons The Grateful Dead were pulling in over 50 million a year in touring revenue alone. Except for the 2-3 minutes he discusses his health, Jerry is always focused on the experience of the audience. Jerry Garcia and his band-mates respected their audience, viewed them as intelligent and selective, and most importantly, never took them for granted.

One of my favorite exchanges comes in the last 30 seconds:

• Interviewer: “You still get nervous?”
• Jerry Garcia: “… I wouldn’t have any emotional attachment if I didn’t. I think it’s a bad idea to take a crowd of 30 or 40 thousand people for granted, ya know what I mean?”
• Interviewer: “It just seems like they’re ready. They’re gonna accept you”
• Jerry Garcia: “I think that’s a convenient illusion”

Do you respect your audience? Ahem, excuse me, I mean your customers?

Is Customer Service & Support a Marketing/PR Function?

Maggie Fox at SMG has some interesting observations about the viral nature of social media and the time-crunch that’s occurring as a result. In a Customer Service and/or Tech Support context this is worth noting. Remember that a response to a customer can now be published to thousands in seconds.

Whether that’s a good response or a bad one is up to the company providing it. It may also simply be the result of an excruciatingly long time before a customer gets a response. Saying nothing can be as harmful as saying the wrong thing.

Bottom line – Customer Service is now Marketing and PR. Your company has to be prepared to manage this by ensuring your service & support organization is rock solid in terms of process, technology, and talent.

Jay

I received a newsletter from SupportIndustry.com (www.supportindustry.com) today advertising a webinar being put on by the folks over at GoToAssist (www.gotoassist.com) that centers on the importance of the first 30 seconds in any customer support interaction.

I have no idea whether or not it will be of value to anyone, and I’m not endorsing either organization, but thought I’d pass along the webinar registration link and brief summary at the bottom of this blog post if anyone has interest.

Seeing the newsletter reminded me of the long debate I had with my team leads at our support center about what we should say to a customer, or what we should try to collect from a customer, inside the first 30-60 seconds of answering the phone. It’s amazing how complex a simple sentence or two can get when you are trying to both concisely convey and extract information at the same time – all as the first step in, ahem, “delighting” the customer.

It can get interesting and challenging as you progress out in to the first 2-3 minutes of a call depending on your industry or product. Call control is a huge consideration and one major advantage to scripted or structured calls is control. Nothing is worse than answering the phone “Thanks for calling Acme, Inc. My name is Jay, how can I help you?” because you’ll have some poor support person on the phone for 20 minutes before he/she gets a customer name or a phone number. Though they may extract the dog’s name, the cause of an ex-husband’s demise, or a lesson in how not to speak to co-workers. “How may I help you?” irks me greatly.

• I’ve found that what order to ask customer questions during a call will be heavily influenced by the case management and/or CRM systems that are employed. The length of time it takes to enter or retrieve information may not jive with the flow of the conversation. Ideally you want to be fluid and sound knowledgeable vs. stuttered, or as if you are only just discovering what info you have on the customer, if any at all. The flip side is that customers just can’t stand being forced to answer 37 questions, particularly if they call you fairly often.
  
  (Come to think of it, SaaS apps like Netsuite and Salesforce.com still haven’t offered up any truly inventive solutions to this problem. Any case form data entry is only partially organized, and more than that there isn’t a really kick-butt facility to build out your call flow in harmony with the case data entry/retrieval workflow. Their tab paradigm requires too much pointing and clicking and any screen pops you want to build all have to be done with JavaScript or something. None of it is a natural act. But I digress…)
  
• Keep both new and existing customers in mind when designing these things and use your AVR prudently. Try to avoid too many phone tree menus, e.g. “If you need help programming the VCR, Tibetan Buddhists that have already received enlightenment should press 8 then the # sign. Press 9 if enlightenment continues to elude you.”
• Another good option for previous customers is to provide them with the auto-assigned ID generated by the CRM system to their name. Typically you can look up a customer by that vs. just “John Smith” and all of the duplicate entries. Doesn’t work as well in the consumer space but holds up in business-to-business market if they call you back and provide the “Customer ID Number” for faster data retrieval. Of course, more sophisticated organizations may bind their phone system’s AVR to the case management systems, but for the smaller companies I tend to work with that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Here’s that webinar info:

I have a profile over on the Austin door64 site and began cross posting my blog recently. A frequent poster spawned a new thread yesterday after reading an eWeek article on Salesforce.com including a “Twitter in the Cloud” offering.

Here’s a link to the eWeek article:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Salesforcecom-Puts-Twitter-in-Its-Service-Cloud-351280/

Clearly, this is another example of a company getting in on what everyone now recognizes as an industry buzz with some momentum. And the offering certainly gets very very close to what I’ve been talking about, though my example was more targeted at a specific workflow challenges.

I had a similar experience not long ago. I had tossed out a Twitter update lamenting the fact that the Flock web browser had no native support for Linked-In despite including just about everything else. Low and behold, Flock responded the next day and indicated that Linked-In had yet to open up their API, which was a gating factor in Flock including it in their offering. It was a great example of how companies are out there mining for dissatisfied customers and getting ahead of them with no direct inbound request from the user themselves.

But I’m a hands-on-the-keyboard implementation guy and once you get past the edgy buzz and fuzzy value, I still think the far more boring and practical implications have miles to go. Off the top of my head are questions like:

• What happens after someone discovers a product mention out in the Social Media Cloud?
• Is a case created automatically?
• What kind of workflow happens as a result?
• What determines which team in the organization handles the mention?
• How new or old is the data and what aspect of the system is able to discern from a Twitter update last week that was already handled vs. one today. (Closing the loop is always the hard part)
• What kind of performance management reporting is being generated that offers any kind of meaningful, actionable information? If you aren’t learning, then what are you doing, exactly?

The one I find the most intriguing is that any time you have a “case” or “incident” there’s typically a need to bind it to a customer entity. I wonder how companies will bind the case when they don’t know who the entity is beyond “twitter.com/their_profile”? It has interesting implications for the CRM players, who’s entire notion of customer management is built around the idea that you KNOW who your customer is. Certainly during my time at Motion, where the entire Sales channel was built off a network of distributors and resellers, the biggest challenge was knowing who owned the product and where? The distributor model made your view of the customer very opaque.

It quickly becomes a “Customer Master Creation” problem. And now a Company profile as well as individual Contact profiles will need to provide facilities for capturing the Facebook site location, Twitter, etc. You might as well have their status updates fed directly in to the CRM system and trigger workflow off of those. Interesting.

Most importantly, how on earth does a company justify the soft costs and hard costs that go with this? What P&L eats the line item? Does inside Sales own it? Customer Service? Marketing? Is it shared? The reality is that it will end up in the Service organization at some point as being yet another channel that has to be monitored and maintained, and heaven forbid a Twitter inferno starts over something innocuous. The last thing in the world you need is a VP of Sales, or the CEO, screaming bloody murder because Service wasn’t able to contain a Twitter update gone awry and now it’s perpetuating like mad.

Unless you have mechanisms that leave you in defensible positions you’ll find a lot of resistance to incorporating this stuff in to the Service teams. If I were running your service or support organization I’d want to define very clearly and very early on what metrics determined success or failure before I took on the headcount and ownership.

Perhaps SFDC has addressed many of these questions already. I’ll have to go read up on what the Salesforce.com offering is in more detail. I have some friends who work there and I’m curious to see what they perceive the value is along with the elegance of the implementation. I’ll circle back and share what I learn, if anything.

Jay